About This Book

We all have them - magical dreams, eerie premonitions, miraculous, unexplainable moments. You will be awed and amazed by these true stories from everyday people who have experienced the extraordinary. The 101 stories in this book will enlighten and encourage you to listen to your dreams and your own inner voice.

More from Chicken Soup for the Soul

Inspired by the book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and the Unexplainable by Amy Newmark and Kelly Sullivan Walden

It’s not crazy. You really can use your dreams to change your life — by listening to your own thoughts. "The wisdom of your subconscious communicates with you all the time, whether or not you are asleep or awake, whether you listen or not," explains Kelly Sullivan Walden, the well-known dream expert who coauthored Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and the Unexplainable. Here are five things to keep in mind about your dreams, drawn from stories in the book:

Sometimes you have to stick up for what a dream told you. Patricia Miller had a recurring dream: she was walking through her grandparents’ house, which was scheduled to be torn down by a developer. The dream revealed a dark cubby above the stairs, and somehow Patricia knew there was something valuable in there. When she phoned home from college to report this, her mom was skeptical, saying the house had been emptied long before. Patricia was so insistent, though, that her mother went back to the old house. Sure enough, right where the dream had predicted, she found an antique crystal chandelier, which now hangs in their new home.

You might meet your soul mate in your dreams. Lori Chidori Phillips’ family honored their Japanese heritage. They lived in Hawaii and would often take a furo hot bath together. When Lori was five, she dreamt that she was in the hot tub with her grandmother, but there was a little blond boy there, too. She felt a surprising joy. Two decades later, in California, a tall blond man walked into Lori’s office. The attraction was instant. After they had been dating for a while, Lori’s boyfriend told her about a recurring dream he had when he was eight years old back in Texas. He was in a large hot tub with an older Asian woman and a little girl with black hair. Lori says, "What are the odds that two little children separated by thousands of miles had the same dream about each other and then met twenty years later?" Lori and her blond man have been together now for 32 years.

Dreams can be uncanny, unexplained vehicles for surprising truths. Eva Carter had the dream for the first time when she was 20. An angel was carrying a baby toward her. Over the years, she had the dream about once a year, with the baby turning into a little girl and then a young woman as the years went on. One day Eva was discussing her family with friends, and she found herself saying that she was a middle child, even though she knew she only had an older brother. Decades passed, and then, on a trip back to Czechoslovakia, where she was born, Eva learned the truth. Her father had a child after he divorced her mother, but he never told anyone. Eva reached out to her dream sister, and now she is part of her life... for real.

Your dreams may provide a diagnosis that your doctors missed. T’Mara Goodsell was a young woman when she had a nightmare. She and a friend were wearing shorts and her friend pointed out there was something wrong with T’Mara’s ankle. She looked down to find two large mushrooms sprouting from it. A year later, when a doctor pronounced that a blemish on her ankle was "nothing" she decided to listen to her dream and get a second opinion. Sure enough, she had the worst kind of skin cancer — melanoma. T’Mara says, "Without that nightmare, I wouldn’t still be alive."

Your dreams can give you life-changing guidance. In her dream, Judy Dykstra-Brown was sitting in a bar or restaurant when a woman approached, threw a drink in her face, hit her head with the glass, and shouted, "Just wake up!" And with that, Judy woke up in real life, to the sound of a woman yelling "wake up." She realized it was herself, and furthermore, that she was sopping wet and had a bump on her head. In her sleep, she had picked up a water glass from her nightstand, poured it over herself and hit her head. Judy sat down to figure out what she was supposed to "wake up" about, and realized that it was time to quit her ten-year teaching career and pursue her original passion for writing. She moved from Oregon to California, and then to Mexico, where she has lived for 15 years now, supporting herself through her new career as a writer.